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This chapter discusses ways to handle children dealing with the impending death of a relative, describing the case of three-year-old Sachar, who visited her grandmother who had already lost consciousness. It suggests that children, like adults, should be a part of the dying process of their close relatives, and also highlights the importance of allowing children to have the opportunity to say goodbye to dying relatives in a comfortable way.

This chapter demonstrates how contemporary female Sanskritists in Maharashtra reconfigure Sanskrit, the “father language” of Brahminical Hinduism, as a “grandmother language” and how women engage in new ways to imbue the practices and activities of everyday life with religious meaning. Female Sanskritists unite their stridharma, or ritual duties as women, with the use of Sanskrit in everyday life, importing Sanskrit into everyday events and practices like childbirth, food preparation, and the feeding of family. In so doing, these women reconstitute Sanskrit as a domestic language of interpersonal care and personal transformation; they also reconfigure the “profane” moments of everyday life, imbuing them with religious meaning by sacralizing them with powerful religious mantras.

This chapter discusses the factors to consider in taking children to funerals, describing the case of Naomi, who decided to take all her daughters to the funeral of her grandmother. It suggests that it is important to take children to funerals and not to send them to school or kindergarten during the formal mourning period. The chapter also highlights the importance of explaining to children what they are expected to do at the funeral or formal mourning rituals.

This chapter considers the position of grandparents in the law. An increasing amount of child care is undertaken by grandparents. Sociological data discussing the role grandparents play are examined. The current legal status of grandparents are summarized and the chapter provides an analysis of the arguments over whether there should be a more formal legal status given to them. Grandparents can play a particularly important role when parents are no longer able to look after their children themselves. The are some complex legal and social issues that arise when grandparents take on care of their grandchildren and these are discussed.

Religions, like all social institutions, tend to address individuals through only one or two of their possible identities. In male-dominated religions, women are defined primarily as wives. In addition, male-dominated religions relate to women as daughters, especially in the sense of daughters whose virginity must be guarded over. In female-dominated religions, neither wife nor daughter is the most salient aspect of women's identity (which is not to say that women are never addressed as wives or daughters). Instead, women receive attention primarily as mothers, grandmothers, or sisters. In women's religions, childbirth is not merely a biological event, Motherhood is vested with important cultural significance, and rituals express and validate the emotional and symbolic meanings of motherhood. In many women's religions, theology and ceremony provide women with some measure of control over fertility. Motherhood—culturally constructed in various shapes—does not impact upon religiosity in a uniform manner.

The author makes his first visit to the Wednesday demonstration, a protest on behalf of the survivors of the “comfort woman” system, and to the House of Sharing, a rest home and educational center where a small group of survivors live. The chapter introduces the South Korean political movement on behalf of the survivors, and the network of support that sees to their welfare. It discusses the ideologically-loaded and mass-mediated space of the House of Sharing, and the South Korean postcolonial ideologies of sharing and woundedness which shape the environment in which the women live.

In this chapter we argue that to understand the ways that policy, structure and culture all shape how grandmothers help to care for children, we need to re-think our approach to these issues. We need in particular to think about policies in terms of how they impact on mothers and grandmothers simultaneously, providing different and complex incentives and opportunities in each generation. This leads us to conceptualise childcare as something that is organised in the wider family, and to think of family care versus formal care when considering the wider impacts on individuals and society, rather than focussing on maternal versus non-maternal childcare. It also necessitates thinking about how cultures of gender, family and paid work might be influencing family-level discussions and negotiations. We show that conceptualising childcare as a family collaboration framed by policy and culture helps to explain substantial variations in grandmaternal childcare across Europe..

Within contexts of poverty and HIV/AIDS in (South) Africa, this chapter positions itself at the interface of the historical-moral engagement of grandparents caring for grandchildren and contemporary social realities and aspirations. The phenomenon of the oldest generation caring for younger generations builds on a long-established continuum of social structures and norms related to intergenerational support. However, in the context of HIV/AIDS they are increasingly being forced to take sole responsibility for their grandchildren, including legal guardianship. In this chapter I argue that the point of departure for these grandmothers is an obligatory contribution perspective which often overrides their own needs and aspirations with implications for their own care futures. During the past decade, however, an increasingly more rights-based / corrective discourse developed through which expectations and demands of younger generations are questioned and the obligatory contribution discourse is contested or at least relativized through negotiation..

This chapter examines two dominant research constructs namely, ‘cultural obligation’ and ‘intergenerational reciprocity’ in caring for grandchildren in Chinese societies – Fuzhou and Singapore. Drawing on Social Relational Theory (SRT), it examines the agency of grandmothers through unpacking the rationales for their involvement or non-involvement in childcare, and the goals and meanings they ascribe to their decisions. Grandparents are viewed as agents: capable of setting goals, devising plans, strategies and taking actions to achieve their goals in the relational contexts with their adult children and grandchildren. The key research questions addressed in this chapter are : (1) to what extent do grandmothers in Fuzhou and Singapore are influenced in their decisions to provide childcare by similar yet diverse Confucian roots; (2) understanding the socio-cultural discourses of grandparenthood in Fuzhou and Singapore; and (3) whether such discourses will constrain or facilitate their sense of agency in decision making.

This chapter discusses the ways in which a literary character from The Grandmother: A story of country life in Bohemia, written in 1855 by Božena Němcová, is translated into the contemporary conceptualization of the ‘typical’ grandmother in popular culture and an archetype in the sociological meaning of the word, and how it serves as a frame of reference for narrative expressions of identity among contemporary Czech grandmothers. The results are based on the analysis of cultural production and qualitative interviews with Czech active agers, who connect the literary character both positively and negatively to changing social role performances via everyday practices such a food preparation, care and appearance. The chapter concludes by enhancing existing typologies of grandparental roles and shows how the normativity of the ideal operates within the narrative accounts of today´s young-old persons..

This chapter presents and reflects upon the letters of the author's grandmother. It notes that the seeming universality of old age draws simultaneously on the hegemony of certain representations of the old and on the universals of the body. Around the world, for those who survive into old age, eventual debility and death are certainties. But the material effects of death are variable. Though the author's paternal grandmother never mentioned being old in her letters, old age was addressed obliquely throughout. The chapter also considers why many people don't care about Alzheimer's disease. In locating the problem solely in the old person's brain, Alzheimer's denies multiple frames of difference in the constitution of the senile body. At the same time, societies are confronted with new circulations of technology and new hierarchies of embodiment as their forms of marginalization within the world system shift.

This introductory chapter presents the account of Dianne, a working grandmother who is balancing work and caring for grandchildren. She works full-time as an elected official while also taking care of three of her six grandchildren most of the week. Her story shows that grandmothers are prized daycare providers. A survey found that grandparents provide some amount of child care every week. Another study found that more than 43 percent of grandmothers care for grandchildren regularly; 20 percent of which have working mothers. Grandmothers may be considered the most available source of child care, but most of these women are also employed. As such, the book analyzes how working grandmothers balance paid work and unpaid carework.

This chapter observes that once parents separate, grandparents on the mother's side of the family often play a more significant role in supporting their daughter and caring for grandchildren, and maternal grandmothers often have a more influential role than their husbands, the maternal grandfathers. It notes that other research has concluded that both maternal and paternal grandmothers' relationships with their grandchildren are different in quality from those of their husbands who are often less involved in childcare. It further notes that some grandparents in this study claimed that they conducted their grandparenting as ‘a couple’ or a ‘grandparenting unit’. It observes that these factors have led to a conception of a ‘grandparenting hierarchy’ in which grandmothers are ranked more highly than grandfathers and maternal grandparents take priority over paternal grandparents.

This chapter demonstrates both the sociological and methodological significance of Peter's work. It notes that women respondents outnumbered men in both The family life of old people and The last refuge. It observes that in both studies, Peter illustrated everyday experiences but superimposes on his novelist's eye a passion for scientific analysis. It acknowledges that Peter was a pioneer ahead of his time while being at the same time a man of his time, by the recognition given on the importance of the role of women, and especially grandmothers, in these studies. It goes on to trace some of the key demographic, social and economic features of the period and how official statistics — another of Peter's battles — gave over-simplified pictures both of family and work life.

This chapter examines nurturing practices in southern Moldova to reflect on how these enable the transnational mobility made necessary by an ineffective state. The chapter shows how historical experience of both local and socialist state structures of caregiving, as well as a virtual communication era, are part of a distinctive transnational nurturing nexus, where children are provided for by remittances from women labor migrants (other mothers), as well as by state-run daycares, grandmothers, and sometimes friends. Five women’s accounts of their experiences of nurturing as transnational labor migrants form the crux of this chapter as it engages with feminist questions about nurturing and othermothers, including how these are linked to women’s prospects for supporting households and pursuing their own aspirations.

This chapter explores the interactions between ecological cooperation (especially, but not only, cooperative hunting); informational cooperation/social learning; and reproductive cooperation. It argues that these forms of cooperation coevolve positively: for example, social learning makes cooperative foraging more profitable, while the profits of cooperative foraging make extended juvenile learning possible. Moreover, none are primary: there was no key breakthrough that made cooperative human social life possible. The chapter thus argues against versions of the Grandmother Hypothesis, pointing out that grandmaternal provisioning would be impossible unless the social world was already cooperative in other ways as well, and against Kristin Hawkes’ view that hunting was male signalling rather than collective provisioning. The chapter also explores methodological issues about the relevance of ethnography to human evolutionary history, arguing that ethnographic evidence is relevant, when used with suitable precautions.

Nettie Arthur Brown’s The Red Fan (1896) was typical of the humorous spoken-word compositions in twentieth-century America. Due to female elocutionists’ performance traditions, women became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, including a few modernist composers, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Marion Bauer. More typically, comic “musical readings” satirized gender expectations. Courtship, marriage, and domesticity were portayed as less than ideal. Performers sometimes adopted a rebellious boy persona, allowing for women’s further expression of gendered satire. Some compositions depicted grandmothers, and moral and religious works continued and modified nineteenth-century ideals. Piano accompaniments humorously quote well-known compositions and feature closing gestures that punctuate the narratives’ climactic “punch lines.” Ultimately, female composers feminized melodrama, creating genres to speak for and to women.

García Márquez has been regarded as one of the great writers of romantic love. His idea of love and the way he has written it is true in its form, which is both fearsome and joyous. García Márquez's fascination with love can be seen even in his earliest articles, where he tells of lovers reunited after many trials or of how technologies such as the telephone have changed the habits of courtship. Solitude is also a story of love, both familial and romantic. García Márquez's novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother is analyzed herein because of its depiction of love for sale, young love, and unrequited love happening in the Guajira desert. Another story discussed in this chapter is the Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is a parody love story, García Márquez's darkest book so far.